The Best Defense Of Reinhart And Rogoff's Flawed Debt Study

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The world of economics is going into convulsions about the news that Kenneith Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart made a Microsoft Excel coding blunder, which caused them to 'notably' understate average growth rates for countries that have debt surpassing 90% of GDP.

As Tim Fernholz nicely laid out yesterday, the Reinhart/Rogoff study has been quoted by numerous officials around the world in their attempts to justify austerity and other measures to reduce the national debt.

Some might think that if it hadn't been for this blunder, then maybe the world wouldn't have had this disastrous flirtation with austerity (which has been horrible for Europe) and which has been a constant threat in the US.

But all of this would have happened anyway.

As Paul Krugman states in one of his (several) posts on the Reinhart/Rogoff issue: "the larger story is the evident urge of Very Serious People to find excuses for inflicting pain."

This impulse, to show your seriousness by promoting pain, is the real overriding drive behind austerity, not an academic study.